Four of FotoFest’s dazzling displays focus on Indian...

1of 7A still from Mithu Sen’s video “I Have Only One Language; it is not Mine.”Photo: Courtesy of the artist / Courtesy of the artist

2of 7A still from Mithu Sen’s video “I Have Only One Language; it is not Mine.”Photo: Courtesy of the artist / Courtesy of the artist

3of 7A still from Mithu Sen’s video “I Have Only One Language; it is not Mine.”Photo: Courtesy of the artist / Courtesy of the artist

4of 7Leila Sujir combines video of lost-looking but regal peacocks with floating animations in her stereoscopic 3D video projection, “Peacocks Dream.”Photo: Courtesy of the artist / Courtesy of the artist

5of 7Leila Sujir combines video of lost-looking but regal peacocks with floating animations in her stereoscopic 3D video projection, “Peacocks Dream.”Photo: Courtesy of the artist / Courtesy of the artist

6of 7The scrolling text in the video from Abishek Hazra's multi-layered project "Shouting Needham from the Rooftops" is a Bengali translation of a London newspaper report on 'safety fears' about an annual Bengali/Bangladeshi spring festival, with audio of a spoken word performance by the artist.Photo: Molly Glentzer, Houston Chronicle

7of 7Shilpa Gupta's "Shadow 3" is from a series of interactive video projections that allow visitors to interact with changing images that "attach" to their shadows.Photo: Molly Glentzer, Houston Chronicle

India, so vast and complex in its history and cultural influence, makes a head-spinning subject for the FotoFest 2018 Biennial.

Technically, as director Steven Evans explained, “It’s not really about India. It’s about these artists of Indian origin and what their concerns are.”

Through that lens, he and curator Sunil Gupta also are showing that India is not a monolithic place. “It’s got 140 official languages, with 600 languages spoken; multiple religions and ethnicities; concerns of philosophy, language, indigenous people, environment and a new queer sensibility emerging,” Evans said.

Viewers may be dazzled, or dazed, by the busy mix of images that unfold across four venues.

A few categories emerge through what appears to be a scattershot organization: Documentary work and portraiture (especially self-portraiture that employs elaborate impersonations to explore identity) are especially strong.

Most of the 47 featured artists live and work in India. That context matters.

Gupta contrasts India’s contemporary photography scene with that of China, which has 60 schools, a thriving publishing industry and numerous art fairs. In India, art photography is still the activity of the English-speaking elite, he said.

But they do know technology. Like others around the world, India’s contemporary artists have embraced new technology because it’s accessible, cheap to produce and gives them “a certain kind of global credibility,” Gupta said.

About a third of this biennial features new media installations — the most ever — although it doesn’t feel that way because the rooms devoted to projected work are sprinkled across the venues.

Four installations — three by female artists — have stayed with me for their evocative storytelling. There’s one more week to see those at the three locations near Fotofest headquarters; Asia Society Texas Center’s smaller portion is up through late July.

‘Peacocks Dream’

During the opening reception in March, Leila Sujir’s “Peacocks Dream” turned an alcove of the Silver Street Studios building into a spectacle. I fell into its spell on a quieter day, when the nearly 16-minute stereoscopic 3-D (SD3) video, or anaglyph, was projected onto just one wall and I could don 3-D glasses, sit on a bench and hear the audio component.

Regal peacocks amble through a garden of mazes at what appears to be an ancient estate in England, looking out of place with their exotic, brilliant plumage, as viewers hear the measured reading of letters between family members who are worlds apart. Sujir layers funny animated peacocks, floating paisley designs and a fanciful border onto the photography, touches of levity that balance the melancholy tone.

She lives in Montreal. The letters are from her family’s archive, written from her paternal grandfather in Mangalore, India, to her father, who died young, in his mid-30s, in a plane crash in Canada. For years, she feared that her father’s story would become her own because his journeys placed him in precarious positions, too far away from home. Her narrative is abstract enough that “Peacocks Dream” expresses a universal sense of disorientation and loss.

SD3 dates from the mid-1800s but has evolved. Anaglyphs combine superimposed imagery and colored filters. Sujir has experimented with projection mapping, which places SD3 video space into the built environment — to create installations — for more than a decade. She appreciates the “haptic sense of space” it creates to help convey themes of migration that have intrigued her for 30 years. “SD3 video spaces are elastic and dream-like places, ephemeral, yet capable of extending a sensation of volume, physicality, and presence to the viewer,” she writes.

Watching “Peacocks Dream” made me wish I could see Sujir’s entire “Elastic City Spacey” series.

‘I Have Only One Language: it is not Mine’

Mithu Sen, from Delhi, also brings a delicate sense of humor to a poignant subject. Her installation includes a few potted plants, but its primary feature is a manipulated video of a quirky performance: The artist posed as a homeless woman, speaking an incomprehensible language, to interact with unsuspecting, adolescent girls at a government-run orphanage.

Their attempts to understand her — they even try to teach her to write — reveals the empathy with which they approach the world. These are girls on the cusp of a lot of things, still playful but also worldly, in a community that looks both isolated and sheltered.

Sen’s digitizing technique, with effects that recall William Kentridge’s “moving drawings,” reduces imagery to red lines on a white background. At times it goes almost abstract, with a keen and rapid sense of movement. Occasionally Sen grounds viewers by slipping in realistic photography, some of which was shot by the girls.

‘Shouting Needham From the Rooftops’

With one of the most conceptual installations of the biennial, Abhishek Hazra occupies a back wall of the Asia Society’s show.

Hazra, a native of Bangalore, explores the politics of language from multiple directions. One of his starting points is discrimination against migrants from Bangladesh in London, whose language is often misread as Arabic. At the same time, he dives into the work of the late Joseph Needham, a historian of Chinese science.

Yes, deeply geeky.

But the visuals are mezmerizing, built of black script that scrolls horizontally across the screen. If you weren’t paying attention, you might think the text had been borrowed from an ancient Chinese manuscript. In fact, it’s the Bengali translation of an East London newspaper report about the city council’s safety fears over an important spring festival that local Bengalis celebrate.

The audio track was recorded during a spoken-word performance, when Hazra shouted excerpts from Needham’s writing through a megaphone, as if he were reciting the Islamic call to prayer.

Most Westerners, including me, won’t understand a word of what they’re hearing or seeing. That mystery makes it all the more enticing.

‘Untitled (Shadow 3)’

Those who remember “Shadow Monsters,” British artist Philip Worthington’s interactive installation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2015, will recognize the technology Mumbai’s Shilpa Gupta uses for her wall of fun.

A camera in the room captures visitors’ silhouettes, projecting their images in real time onto a large wall. Each avatarlike silhouette also appears to be a magnet for ominous other shadowy objects that slowly descend from the top of the screen and attach themselves to every appendage.

Gupta’s work, though as fun as Worthington’s, has a more provocative sensibility. The objects she throws at visitors keep coming, eventually covering and consuming every human figure in sight. Everything morphs into what seems to be an endlessly growing, black sea of industrial garbage.

Perhaps an environmental message to be taken literally, or a metaphor for the weight of the whole, crazy world.

Molly Glentzer, a staff arts critic since 1998, writes mostly about dance and visual arts but can go anywhere a good story leads. Through covering public art in parks, she developed a beat focused on Houston's emergence as one of the nation's leading "green renaissance" cities.

During about 30 years as a journalist Molly has also written for periodicals, including Texas Monthly, Saveur, Food & Wine, Dance Magazine and Dance International. She collaborated with her husband, photographer Don Glentzer, to create "Pink Ladies & Crimson Gents: Portraits and Legends of 50 Roses" (2008, Clarkson Potter), a book about the human culture behind rose horticulture. This explains the occasional gardening story byline and her broken fingernails.

A Texas native, Molly grew up in Houston and has lived not too far away in the bucolic town of Brenham since 2012.